Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [76]
Owl barely had time to try to ask what was wrong when the little girl’s hand clamped across her mouth, and she was whispering, Croaks]
Seconds later they appeared. Three of the walking dead, slouching out of the darkness of an alleyway, casting baleful glances right and left as they passed through the square and continued down a side street. Had Sarah not gotten Owl out of sight, they would have been discovered. Owl braced the little girl by her shoulders. How had she known about the Croaks? Sarah shook her head, not wanting to say, but this time Owl persisted, telling her that it was all right, whatever it was, but that she had to know, it was important.
The little girl said it was the voices.
She said it was the voices inside her head, the ones that came to her both in dreams and in waking, warning her of danger. They were always there, always watching out for her.
Owl didn’t understand. Sarah had voices that spoke to her, that could tell when danger threatened? The little girl nodded, suddenly looking very ashamed.
Owl still didn’t understand. Why wouldn’t she talk about it with the other members of the family? Why did she keep this to herself?
That was when Sarah told her that some people didn’t believe in the voices, that some people thought the voices were bad. Which, in turn, made Sarah bad, and she didn’t want to be bad. But she couldn’t help it that she heard the voices and believed in them. She couldn’t help it that sometimes people didn’t listen to the voices and they died.
Like her mommy and daddy.
Owl left it alone right there, but she told Hawk the story later, and they took Candle aside and told her that the voices were important and that she must always tell them what the voices said. The voices weren’t bad and neither was Sarah. Both were just trying to help, and it was only when you didn’t try to help that you were being bad.
Hawk wasn’t quite sure himself that he believed in the voices at first.
But after a few months of watching Sarah, he changed his mind, especially after taking her with him on foraging expeditions where she repeatedly warned him of unseen dangers, keeping him from harm. Keeping all of them from harm. There was no rational explanation for how she could see these things or where the voices came from, but that didn’t change the facts. Sarah was quickly renamed Candle, and she became their light in the darkest of places.
He let the memory drift back into the past, turning his thoughts to the present as he emerged from the building above their hideout into the square and the onset of twilight. He would have to hurry to make his meeting with Tessa, and he needed to make the meeting in order to keep his promise to Tiger about the pleneten. Cheney padded on ahead of him, big head lowered, sniffing at the pavement and casting sharp glances at the darkened doorways and windows of the buildings they passed. The city was quiet, its few sounds distant and muffled, lost in the darkness and the haze. The smells of decay and pollution drifted up from the waterfront, but Hawk had grown so used to them he barely noticed.
Sometimes he thought about a world in which the smells were all sweet and fragrant, like the wild-flower fields and woodlands he remembered from his Oregon childhood. Sometimes he imagined he would take the Ghosts one day to a place that smelled like that.
He moved down First Avenue through the derelict vehicles and piles of trash, through the grass and weeds growing up through cracks in the pavement, and then turned north while still on his side of the compound and made his way toward the old entry to the light rail station. He was thinking again of Candle’s vision and her admonition to him that they must flee the city. He was thinking that everything that had happened lately was telling him that